The ultimate guide to White Hat SEO

Search engine optimization is more important than ever. With the increasing customer dependency on the internet, it’s only practical to integrate a carefully planned SEO strategy into your business. Every big and small business with an online presence wants a piece of organic search traffic. The legit way to have an edge over the competition and rank higher on the search engines is to invest your money on White Hat SEO.

Google incorporates a range of signals to determine where pages rank for a search. Knowing which factors can give your desired result (ranking on search engine results page) and optimizing according to that can be a major factor driving traffic to the website. In this blog, we’re going to discuss what White Hat SEO is, the importance and benefits of White Hat SEO, and the techniques that you can apply to your SEO strategy. So, let’s get started.

What is White Hat SEO?

The term White Hat SEO refers to a collection of ethical techniques and tactics employed by webmasters to improve a website’s standing in the search engine result pages (SERPs). It involves search engine approved website optimization techniques, including Google, and focuses on providing users with the best search engine results experience by creating quality content and a website that stands out in the niche. It safeguards the business’s reputation by adding value and longevity to the website. White hat techniques provide an excellent chance of boosting traffic and improving online visibility without using risky tactics.

While white hat SEO employs ethical techniques to boost search engine rankings, by contrast, black hat SEO is the use of shady practices that break or do not follow search engine guidelines. It focuses on exploiting search engine loopholes through unethical and illicit techniques such as content automation, keyword stuffing, cloaking, creating duplicate content and much more. Their aim is not to provide users with search experience but to optimize content for search engines to increase the website’s ranking and traffic.

What you need to know is white hat SEO is a better choice than its counterparts (black hat SEO) in the long run. The ranking and traffic exposure attained by employing black hat techniques are short-lived as the search engines penalize and remove such websites from their indexes.

What is Google penalization?

Google’s goal is to provide the best search experience to its users, which is why it strictly maintains the quality of the websites in its index. To maintain this, Google penalizes the sites that are involved in unethical practices. If there is a sudden drop in the traffic of your website or your ranking has diminished, it is probably because you have been penalized by Google.

When you are penalized by Google, your offending pages will vanish from SERPs and organic search traffic will diminish dramatically. If this happens with you, you can check whether or not you have been penalized by visiting Google Search Console.

To undo this, you need to get rid of all unethical practices and employ white hat techniques.

Why invest in White Hat SEO?

White hat SEO techniques can do wonders in improving different aspects of your website. To achieve long-term success, investment in the slow and steady white hat SEO strategies is the way to go. To drive the point home, below mentioned are some beneficial effects that you stand to gain with white hat SEO.

1. Save time and money: White hat SEO is committed to long-term goals that don’t violate any guidelines laid down by Google. Since black hat SEO strategies violate those guidelines, it needs money to implement and maintain these strategies because the Google algorithm is fast-paced and updates its security parameters regularly. You don’t need to spend much for white hat SEO techniques, just work harder and have patience until your website starts getting noticed, and then you can enjoy organic visibility and better ROI.
2. Build organic visibility: Sites that follow white hat SEO techniques and attain higher rank on search engine result pages by following the Google guidelines enjoy their position in the long run. Google keeps tweaking its algorithm to demote spam websites and ban the ones that follow illicit strategies to attain a high spot on SERPs. Thus, to surpass the storms of regular updates, use white hat SEO to cement your spot on SERPs.
3. Build brand reputation: It takes a long time to build a reputation in any field, be it business or online business. Adhering to the rules laid down by Google will help you build a good brand reputation in the eyes of the public and your target audience as white hat SEO practices shields your website against Google penalties and being banned. Thus, it builds reliability and makes your site live longer on SERPs, delivering true values to the user.
4. Achieve higher ROI: White hat SEO practices can help you attain business profitability and get a higher return on investment (ROI). Because you’re constantly working on updating your website according to Google’s policy and patiently practicing white hat techniques on your website, it automatically gains the attention of the audience and also ensures higher ranking over the search engine, thus setting you up for solid ROI in the long term.

White Hat SEO techniques to try out

Let’s look into a few white hat SEO techniques with an aim to improve your website visibility to the search engines.

1. Focus on mobile first: In 2016, Google started to emphasize on the mobile search results. Later they announced that “pages where content is not easily accessible to a user on the transition from the mobile search results may not rank as highly.” The Google index is going mobile first and not having mobile-friendly pages can affect your rankings. They came out with suggestions in their new guidelines for email optin pop-ups, display ads, and suitable content.

If you aren’t sure whether your website meets the criteria for being mobile-friendly, Google’s mobile-friendly test app can help you check it. Just log into your Search Console Account and check the Mobile Usability Report or just take the Mobile Friendly Test on  Google. The report will tell you all you need to know about the mobile-friendliness of your site, and you can figure out if you need to make any changes.

While web designing isn’t a part of white hat SEO, taking care that you’re fulfilling Google’s standards is. So, you must focus on making your site mobile friendly.

2. Prioritize user experience: Google’s primary focus has always been on providing the best user experience (UX) to its users. As the algorithm gets smarter, websites that work on UX stand to gain the most benefit. Google has a range of signals, like bounce rate and more, to help them identify if a site is delivering bad UX.

According to a study from the Oxford Journal Interacting with Computers, a business’s user design’s aim is to “improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through the utility, ease of use, and pleasure provided in the interaction with a product.” Since your website is the product, your objective should be to determine the user’s intent and build a design that will appease that intent, thus providing for great UX.

Incorporating your website with the best UX practices is not as difficult as it was in the past. You can practice A/B testing and run a series of experiments to see what’s working for your website. With Google’s growing movement towards transparency, they published a guide that covers the basics of UX that you can implement while building your website. Continue to test and tweak different elements of the website until you’re able to quantify what’s working and what isn’t.

3. Link building: Links are vitally important to ranking as search engines still rely on them to judge the relevance and quality of a website. So if you’re not attracting quality links, then your website would sink to the bottom rather than dashing to the top of the rankings. The key is to get the right kind of links that have relevance to your website, go through human editorial review, and are earned on the basis of quality and relevance of the published content.

Employing white hat SEO techniques, you can get quality links from real websites that are relevant to your own. The easiest way to do this is by creating a resource center that can work for any website. The goal of this page is to provide valuable content to the extent that the other websites cannot help but link to it. Not only will this technique attract quality links, but also help you build a trusty and authoritative page.

4. Use schema for a competitive edge: There is a huge opportunity to use schemas as a competitive edge. A 2014 study found that almost 35% of Google search results are seen with Rich Snippets supported by Schema. What is even more surprising is that only 0.3% of sites are using the Google-approved Schema tool. The percentage may have improved slightly over time, but there is still a huge opportunity to use schemas for sites that want to outrank competitors.

Founded at Schema.org, Schema is a collection of various HTML tags that can be added to a page to enhance the description that is seen on SERPs (commonly known as rich snippets). There are many rich snippets types, for example reviews, music, product markup, etc. A simple Google search can show you rich snippets fashioned with Schema a variety of pages.

Schema makes it easier for search engines to understand your page. The rich snippets also enhance UX by giving more information about the page. The microdata about your page can also increase the click-through rate in the SERPs.

5. Smart keyword research: In the early SEO days, keywords were the main tool for manipulating the algorithm. The old technique of picking and planting keywords wherever possible has expired. Keyword research has remodeled the role it plays in SEO. Its association with the website has become more holistic. Even the old way of performing the keyword research has changed, thanks to the new and improved Google algorithm called RankBrain.

RankBrain is a machine learning system that puts the content in context. In other words, Google no longer relies on strings of metadata. It has made Google so smart that now it understands the subtleties of language, like synonyms and stemming.

The new generation keyword research tools such as Moz and Ahrefs have developed and improved their tool by creating things like Parent Topics and Keyword Groups. Now you can develop content that incorporates specific keywords and also contextually relevant phrases. Just be natural with keyword placement and make sure they are relevant to your SEO content because that’s the white hat technique.

6. Focus on content marketing: They don’t say “content is king” just for nothing. Content is one of the most significant Google ranking factors, so it’s important that you do it right. It’s not as easy as just writing good content, but there are certain factors that you have to keep in mind like a relevance to the niche that you’re targeting and writing top-notch subject matter so that your audience finds value on consuming and sharing it.

Anne Headley has summed the formula to write great content as –

Useful x Enjoyable x Inspired = Innovative Content

The idea is to deliver valuable content enjoyably so that the competition doesn’t affect your traffic while you also draw authoritative links from other websites, as we’ve discussed above (link building).

Quality content can be wheeled for the entire website to run on. So focus on publishing evergreen content that stands the test of time, rather than fads. And while you’re at it, make sure to freshen up old and outdated content so that the website remains fresh, and you’re able to maintain the quality with updated content.

Wrap up

If you want to stay ahead in the competition, white hat SEO is the way to go. By focusing on user experience, quality backlinks, excellent keyword research and other points discussed above, you can future proof your efforts and ensure that your work isn’t going to be undone by any future Google updates. Once you grasp how the techniques work, it’ll become easier for you to market your business, increase traffic and visibility.

References:

1. 7 White Hat SEO techniques to double traffic
2. White Hat SEO: How to play by the rules and win